The buttery yellow ramparts encircling the center of Avignon stretch 2.6 miles and are notched with arrow slits and gaps for dumping boiling water or cooking oil on attackers below.
Over the centuries, the walls have protected popes and warded off sieges. They have been rebuilt by the 19th-century architect who refurbished Notre-Dame, Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, and have been decorated by the notices for plays since the summer theater festival began in the city soon after World War II.
And for the last four months, they have borne witness to the mass rape trial occurring in the modern courthouse just across the road and to its central victim, Gisèle Pelicot.
The night before the trial began in early September, a group of local feminists traveled around the city and pasted pieces of paper with letters on them to walls, in large collages. They contained messages for the accused men who would arrive to court the next day.
“Rapist, we see you,” read one along the lip of an arched gate through the wall.
“Victims, we believe you,” read another.
The feminists belong to a group called the Amazons of Avignon. Like other feminist collectives in France, they had been gluing up messages about violence against women around the city for years. But they picked up their pace after Ms. Pelicot pushed for the trial to be opened to the public.
Her husband of 50 years, Dominique, was convicted on Thursday of having drugged her for almost a decade to rape her, and then inviting men he met online to rape her. With the help of a library of videos and photographs he took of the assaults, the police tracked down 50 other men — and charged all but one with raping, attempting to rape or sexually assaulting Ms. Pelicot.
They were all convicted on Thursday and given sentences ranging from 3 to 15 years in prison. Mr. Pelicot was sentenced to the maximum of 20 years.
A retired manager and grandmother, Ms. Pelicot felt her life and self-identity crash into a “field of ruins,” she explained. She decided to point a huge magnifying glass over her intimate horror, to force the country to look and see the prevalence of rape.
After that decision, different messages began to decorate Avignon’s walls, celebrating her.
“Gisèle, courageous and dignified,” read one. “Gisèle standing, braving the storm. Women admire you,” read another. And this one, simple and poetic: “Wonder Gisèle.”
The Amazons, like many local residents, attended the trial, where they attentively watched the proceedings and took notes. At the end of each day’s session, they joined the honor line to cheer Ms. Pelicot as she left court. Then, at night, they ventured out and pasted unadulterated words from her testimony to the walls of their city.
“Since I arrived in this courtroom, I have felt humiliated,” read one such citation. “I have the impression that the guilty one is me and that behind me are 50 victims,” read another.
They painted a huge banner with her response to one of the defense lawyers who had maladroitly explained the difference between the legal definition of rape and the street one. Then, they climbed up ladders and hung it from the ramparts right across from the front door of the courthouse.
“A rape,” it read, “is a rape.”
“We are in total admiration of what she is doing,” said Fanny Fourès, 48, a French teacher who was out with the Amazons one night in October, helping the group to paste up the message: “Gisèle, we are all with you.”
“We feel in our guts, we have to be there, to watch her back,” Ms. Fourès added.
Avignon, an ancient city of about 90,000 people about 430 miles south of Paris, gained considerable importance in the 14th century, when Pope Clement V moved there from Rome and built his palace and the walls. Eight more popes — some of them disputed — stayed there.
Like Paris, Avignon is divided between the more upscale ancient center — “intra-muros,” which means “within the walls” in Latin — and its poorer suburbs, known as “extra-muros.” The dividing line is formed by the rampart walls.
Since the trial began, the Amazons have ventured out about three times a week to paste messages on both sides of the ramparts, but mostly concentrating on the intra-muros area near the courthouse.
Some people who live and work inside the walls say the last few months have felt particularly heavy. They’ve seen Ms. Pelicot walking to and from the courthouse each day, sometimes stopping to tell her “bravo.” They’ve also brushed shoulders with the more than 40 lawyers on the case and the many accused who were found guilty on Thursday.
“Shame must change sides,” said Damien Sentilhes, 63, an artist who works in a gallery near the courthouse, echoing words from Ms. Pelicot that were also painted on a banner and hung from the ramparts. “It’s really obvious that shame is on the side of men.”
Both Ms. Pelicot and some of the accused have shopped at Eddy Hiolet’s small grocery store a block from the courthouse.
“It’s a weird feeling. We feel uneasy, sometimes we’d rather not serve these people because what they’ve done is huge,” Mr. Hiolet, 58, said. But as uncomfortable as it has been, he’s glad for the trial: “If it can shake things up a bit, it’s for the best.”
In November, the Amazons began pasting up the words they heard some of the accused use in court, again word for word.
“People need to know what they are saying,” explained the group’s founder, Blandine Deverlanges, 56. “Rape culture is that too — it’s the explanations we hear that are so backwards and so trivialized. Just by repeating them, it should provoke a reaction.”
One such statement from a defendant read: “I committed a rape, it’s my body not my brain.” Black letters on a yellow wall spelled out: “It wasn’t me. It was my doppelgänger.” On a large wall a few paces from the courthouse was pasted: “It is an involuntary rape.”
At the bottom of that last one was written in small type the name of the man who had uttered that line.
That had not been part of the original collage, Ms. Deverlanges explained. Someone outside their team added it later. The Amazons also noticed that people began to write notes directly to Ms. Pelicot in the white spaces around the letters of their signs: “Thank you Gisèle.” “Nous t’aimons.” “Vielen Dank Gisèle.”
“Our collages, once they are in the world, they don’t belong to us anymore,” Ms. Deverlanges said. “Women have appropriated them and used them as a platform for their own words. It’s wonderful.”
One tangible impact of the trial, the Amazons believe, is a newfound sense of their role and place in the city, along with their occupation of public space.
Adèle Bossard, a local radio journalist, said: “The feminist movement here has grown. Now there are many women who are active — I think that will likely change the city.”
Not everyone agrees. Some say the trial’s impact on Avignon has been minimal, and ephemeral.
“I’m not sure these messages shock everyone,” said Paul Payan, a lecturer in medieval history at the local university. “It’s bizarre to see them detached from their judicial context.”
Others believe Avignon is simply a microcosm of France, which is already changing because of the trial.
“I think women will talk more and more now,” said Camille Leroy, 21, a law student from Avignon who attended the trial. “No one has survived something worse than Gisèle. If she could do it, we all can do it, too.”
The Amazons believe they have played their small part, echoing the messages in the courtroom out through the city and from there, throughout the country and the world.
On the night before the verdict, they were joined by more than a dozen journalists, clambering for the best angle of their emerging messages, pasted up on walls already crowded by other snippets of testimony and poetry.
“51, tous capables, tous coupables,” the women pasted up in one spot: “51, all capable, all guilty.”
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